Generic visuals in the news as public images: activating emotions, experiences and identities

Generic visuals like stock photos and simple data visualizations circulate in the news with increasing frequency, and so do dominant narratives about them. Stock photos are clichéd and inauthentic, data visualizations represent facts, so the narratives go. Such narratives suggest that generic visuals have limited capacity to function as public images – that is, as visual media for social thought and civic spectatorship. Findings from our research contradict this. We found that while UK-based news audiences mobilized dominant narratives when talking about stock photos and simple data visualizations in general terms, this did not happen in specific engagements with particular generic visuals. In these cases, participants moved beyond dominant narratives, as generic visuals activated emotions, experiences and participants’ different identities. We argue that generic visuals in the news are resources with which people make sense of their everyday lives and that people’s everyday lives are resources with which they make sense of generic news visuals. As such, generic visuals do, in fact, function as public images, connecting and engaging audiences in public life and foregrounding the role of the personal in engagements with the social issues portrayed in the news.